Search results

The objective of this paper is to evaluate brand extension from a consumer consumption perspective. The most relevant entity becomes both the product and the choice vector. This provides a different aspect of the heterogeneity as it concerns brand extension.

Nestlé was selected as the brand to be studied and two qualitative studies were carried out on students based on open‐ended interviews. After a pre‐test, two groups of 400 students were selected. The first group was exposed to the diet biscuits in the context of “nibbling” and the second group exposed to the lip applications in the context “protecting my lips”.

The results confirm the importance of the consumption context in terms of evaluating a brand extension. The study shows that the effects of the context fit and the typicality are more important when the category to which the brand extension is found is sensitive to the consumption context. In contrast, the effect of the association fit is more important when the category to which the brand extension is found is less sensitive to the consumption context.

The paper shows that the category to which the brand extension is found can be defined by its degree of heterogeneity with regard to the consumption context.

The purpose of this paper is to measure the impact of positive and negative same‐gender fictional role models on students’ self‐efficacy and entrepreneurial intention.

The authors conducted an experimental research on 276 French students. Structural equation modeling techniques were employed to measure role model identification, attitude toward the role model, emotional arousal, entrepreneurial self‐efficacy and entrepreneurial intention.

Exposure to fictional role models favorably impacts self‐efficacy and behavioral intentions if students identify with role models, hold favorable attitudes toward the message, and experience positive emotional arousal. Successful role models reinforce role model identification and generate favorable attitudes toward the message, thus enhancing self‐efficacy and entrepreneurial intention. Unsuccessful entrepreneurial role models also favorably reinforce the relationship between self‐efficacy and entrepreneurial intention. Message framing and role models’ gender exert a moderating effect on these results.

Several implications for entrepreneurship education are discussed. The predominance of masculine models in entrepreneurship discourse should be inverted in the agenda of entrepreneurship education. The authors question the overall predominance of positive models in entrepreneurial education and more deeply explore the learning value of negative models.

Entrepreneurial literature mainly focuses on mastery experience and positive real‐life role models as antecedents of entrepreneurial self‐efficacy. Negative role models are rarely examined as potential favorable sources of self‐efficacy beliefs, and little is known about the impact of emotional arousal, another source of self‐efficacy beliefs, as theorized by Bandura.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the relationship between migratory status, the use of legal and illegal psychoactive substances and psychological disorders perceived in a sample of minors.

A transversal multicentre study was carried out with interviews with young people aged 13-16 years recruited from middle and high schools in Italy.

The results show the implementation of a process of normalization in terms of the presence of legal and illegal psychoactive substances in the living contexts of the minors, of their widespread early use and of a substantial indifferentiation in the reasons for use (e.g. pleasure, curiosity, fun). Youths born in Italy with at least one non-native parent are noteworthy for an elevated prevalence of perceived psychological disorders and for particular lifestyles linked to the use of marijuana, alcohol abuse and the intensive consumption of tobacco. Second-generation minors show symptoms of psychological malaise, anxiety and depression before which the use of substances appears to realize a particular form of self-cure.

This study presents some objective limits that indicate prudence in generalizing the results: only those who obtained consent from their parents were interviewed and the information communicated in the interviews could have been influenced by various factors, including the situation and the location. The authors used a standard definition of binge-drinking (Valencia-Martín et al., 2008). Actually, different criteria (i.e. number of drinks, time of consumption, etc.) and formulations of the question are used in different surveys, showing that there is as yet no consensus definition of binge-drinking. Nevertheless, the term has become somewhat confusing as it is often used as a synonym of drunkenness, making cross-cultural comparisons difficult (Beccaria et al., 2014). These are aspects that limit the generalizability of the results to the interviews alone and do not allow for prevalence estimates. Nevertheless, the results offer useful indications for future prevention projects specifically oriented to early adolescence.

The results of the study, on the one hand, document the growing use of legal and illegal proactive substances among minors and the relative cultural trend in this particular age band, testified to by the high number of those who have been present in situations of consumption to whom the substances were offered; on the other, they evidence a subpopulation of youths born in Italy with at least one non-native parent (i.e. second generation of immigrants). These youths stand out for an elevated prevalence of perceived psychological disorders and for their particular lifestyles connected to the use of marijuana, alcohol abuse and the intensive consumption of alcohol. This is also the group with the highest percentage of mothers alone in the family.

A group of adolescents living in a monoparental family, that is, with the mother alone emerges, and as the literature has shown, family structure and poverty are linked (Landale et al., 2011; Svensson and Hagquist, 2009). In fact, such mothers, even those with a high level of education, are mostly unemployed. Adolescents with a single parent often not only face resource deficits but also other risk factors, such as high family stress, inadequate supervision, multiple family transitions and frequent residential moves. Specifically, these second-generation adolescents are female and they manifest sensation-seeking behaviours, but without drug abuse.

The results of the study show new and little-known aspects of the multicultural Italian society that is changing profoundly that should be explored in more detail by targeted research that also focussed on structural factors relatable to specific social positions. In this framework, a particular subgroup, i.e. the second-generation minors, shows symptoms of psychic malaise, anxiety and depression in terms of which substance use seems to realize a form of self-cure.

This paper examines the effects of virtual advertising in a sports broadcast setting. We analyse the conspicuousness of virtual advertising and match the results with explanatory variables like brand awareness, duration of exposure and frequency of exposure. Furthermore, we measure the role of attitudes towards advertising in general and its impact on attitudes towards virtual advertising of the respondents. Our results indicate that most respondents recognise virtual advertising as such. Advertising effectiveness is driven to a large degree by the frequency of exposure. A positive attitude towards advertising in general leads to a positive attitude towards virtual advertising of the participants.

The purpose of this paper is to report a three-study effort that aimed to explicate the brand entification construct, a post-anthropomorphic attribution that results from user-brand interaction on Twitter. Entified brands are not merely humanlike, they are viewed as human celebrities with an elevated social status.

A testable conceptual framework, hypotheses and measurement scales for explicating the brand entification construct are derived from focus groups. The framework is tested using two separate surveys; the first surveyed college going, Millennial users of Twitter, the second surveyed a nationwide sample of Twitter using Millennials.

The fear of being ignored (FOBI) emerges as the key antecedent of brand entification. Elevation in healthy narcissism emerges as its key consequence. Twitter users experiencing elevated narcissism are found to defend entified brands when they receive negative tweets from other users.

All constructs and measurement scales reported in the data are new, the evidence of linkages between the antecedents and consequences of brand entification are similarly unprecedented; both reflect the theoretical contributions of the study. Further testing of scales, and replication of results using multiple samples of Twitter users are essential before formalized theory and widely generalizable findings emerge.

Shaping Twitter-users’ sense of healthy narcissism emerges as the key challenge for managers aiming to build brands via Twitter communication. Stimulating users’ FOBI emerges as a key entry-way in this process.

The paper reports the first empirical investigation of the brand entification construct in the context of Twitter-using Millennials.

The purpose of this paper is to perform a systematic review of articles that have used the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT).

The results produced in this research are based on the literature analysis of 174 existing articles on the UTAUT model. This has been performed by collecting data including demographic details, methodological details, limitations, and significance of relationships between the constructs from the available articles based on the UTAUT.

The findings indicated that general purpose systems and specialized business systems were examined in the majority of the articles using the UTAUT. The analysis also indicated that cross-sectional approach, survey methods, and structural equation modelling analysis techniques were the most explored research methodologies whereas SPSS was found to be the largely used analysis tools. Moreover, the weight analysis of independent variables indicates that variables such as performance expectancy and behavioural intention qualified for the best predictor category. Moreover, the analysis also suggested that single subject or biased sample as the most explored limitation across all studies.

The search activities were centered on occurrences of keywords to avoid tracing a large number of publications where these keywords might have been used as casual words in the main text. However, we acknowledge that there may be a number of studies, which lack keywords in the title, but still focus upon UTAUT in some form.

This is the first research of its type which has extensively examined the literature on the UTAUT and provided the researchers with the accumulative knowledge about the model.